Setting Fire to a Yew Tree
by Elfreida
Summary: Hank was right, and time isn't that simple to fix. Enter a mutant whose life is nothing remarkable, whose powers only work when yolked to another's, without a home, without a future, and who has just lost everything. A woman who can change the world. But...whether she would break or become the flame...that wasn't written yet...[Set immidiately after DotFP]{I do not own the picture}


**My Looking Glass Shows a Brick**

The first time she killed, she didn't even know it until two weeks later. She was twelve, and had only just decided that Mirror was probably a good name when the four of them – Bishop, Nightcrawler, her and Moonstar – got cornered by Magneto in his attempts to 'save all mutants'.

This requires explanation.

Escaping the death camp her mother and brothers had been brought to when she was nine happened because her mother had hid her in a small niche amongst the debris, overlooked and unimportant. There, she trembled for hours listening to the screams.

And then the roar of flamethrowers.

And then just the hum of the machines.

She knew the Sentinels would find her. She was a mutant; they always did. But they overlooked her. Again. And again. So she scrambled out of her hiding place and stumbled through the half-automated, half-abandoned wastes. No one spotted a half-wild child in the gloom. It was a darkness made by smog so thick it blocked out the sun, but she'd always been in that shadow; why should she know it differently?

The real massacre happened long before her time.

As the Sentinels passed a hairsbreadth away, her child's mind reasoned that she must have no mutation at all. No one would believe her, of course. But how else were they missing her? And she didn't have any obvious power. Her mother always joked that her mind was her power. She was clever – really clever – but it didn't take a genius to figure out that this was because she'd been lucky enough to grow up with lots of books, a large brain and a brother who knew electronics inside and out. That she could apply complex knowledge of circuitry and electromagnetic physics at such an age was also in part due to the telepath that had lived with them for a long time (and whom her mother had booted out when she found out he was pouring his own knowledge into a little girl).

Yet this wasn't magical.

Useful of course, though. Particularly when, with no real powers at all, she was able to shut down part of the perimeter fence and climb out of the complex. Two months, malnutrition and a septic knee later, and she was picked up by Shadowcat as she ran through the frozen ruins of Manchester.

They were looking for mutants; trying to save people. So she went with them.

There was little else to do. She'd lost everyone else she'd ever known. But then, they were all lost, one way or another.

They took her under their (sometimes literal) wings. Fed her. Kept her. Incidentally, it didn't take long for her powers to surface. Not that they were particularly prominent or useful, but on her first meeting with Charles Xavier she found herself confused when she felt nothing in her head. She wasn't the only one. Somehow, she resisted him – so much so that he was astonished.

He was wary of her, she realised later.

Possibly because she wasn't afraid.

* * *

"_The worst that can happen is you die. And that isn't so bad in the end."_

_He stared at her with uncanny blue eyes, and she tried to read his face._

"_And what of others? What of the deaths around you?"_

"_People die."_

* * *

She'd hesitated for the first time, then. The screams in her dreams were nothing but numbness. Yet she knew, instinctively, one day (one _terrifying _day) that would change. She was allowed to keep that to herself, though.

* * *

"_It's like pain. Eventually everyone goes away."'_

"_Not always." He tried gently, but she shook her head. She understood the words, but for some reason they made no sense to her._

"_Everyone dies."_

* * *

Kitty tried to get her to call him Professor X, but it never really stuck for her.

Anyway, in three years, she and Charles' people worked out that her power in fact revolved around reflecting back the power she came into contact with. It only functioned if the power was to do with affecting the physical world and she could only do it if the mutant or the mutant's power stayed in contact with her. But it was something. Not impressive or even practical, but she could call herself 'mutant'.

Her knowledge of machinery and electrics was of far greater interest, despite it really being ordinary, but even so they wouldn't have abandoned her, mutant or not. She learnt and grew and fought with them (insofar as was possible for a child).

Which is how she ended up in an abandoned mining tunnel halfway up a mountain being faced by Magneto.

Ironic that she should fear another mutant, but his attempts to recruit the faithful for a full-scale rebellion were, at best, trading one tyrant for another and at worst wholesale slaughter. He also didn't take no for an answer, fanatically proclaiming that, in refusing, they were betraying their own species and deserved to die.

Trapped and alone (Erik was far from alone) she felt Bishop's warmth before her in the cold and Moonstar's arms around her. Nightcrawler was a little off to the side, murmuring a prayer, midnight skin blending into the dark.

The fear touched her. They were all going to die.

That wasn't what she was afraid of, though. She'd been right: people did die. But she didn't want them to. Not again. _Not again. _Was it so much to ask that they be allowed to _be? _That she could fucking hold onto _something?_

"Kurt. I need your cross."

"What was that?"

"Your cross; it's metal, isn't it?"

"Lexi, are you _insane?_" Moonstar was shaking with the effort of maintaining so many illusions to try and throw them off; buy them time. Nightcrawler merely stared at her, wide-eyed.

"You think you might be able to turn the magnetic fields back on him? That's suicide!" The whites of his pointed teeth came properly into view. "You'll never reflect back enough to counter him – it'll burn you up, sweetheart. Like with Sam?"

How could she forget Cannonball's energy building up faster than she could turn it and making an artery burst?

"That was years ago!"

"Kid," Bishop charged his gun. "We got this!"

The cavern shook, dust pouring from the roof.

"We're all about to get ripped apart anyway – please!"

It was a fair point. Moonstar's grip tightened and Bishop growled. But each knew what she'd said all along: the worst that could happen was she could die. But…they were all about to die. Wasn't it a good gamble?

Nightcrawler shut his eyes, calling on his god to protect her, and handed over the chain. It tingled in her palm. She felt the fields intersecting, and tried to reach back along them for the power at their source.

In theory, she should've been able to punch the fields back out so that the more power he plugged into controlling the metal inside the tunnel, the more agency she was given to resist. But that wasn't quite right. She knew by now. No, what she did was something else.

_Like waves breaking on the shore – where was the wind that made them? Far, far out there was the power making them and she could feel it in her bones, making them hum in sympathy, accepted the power as it passed by. Absorbing it like a sponge._

She began to try and apply the fields. But the resistance she met was like running breakneck into a stone wall. And the power was coming faster and faster and she shook as it filled her –

_Nowhere to go; nowhere to go. Oh god, it hurt. It HURT. Burned inside like grains of boiling sand: wrong wrong wrong!_

The world broke apart around them, and she couldn't turn the power, _couldn't couldn't couldn't –_

Except –

Except instinct is a curious thing.

The rational mind might understand what is going on. But the body has ideas of its own if it realises its counterpart has brought it to the brink of destruction. Not only that, but it _knows. _It lets things happen where the brain is scared or just won't let it. In this way, most mutants' powers come explosively in their youth if they are not immediately apparent.

And the power of Erik Lehnsherr was no different, in that respect.

His _Will _was no different.

His will to control it.

It awoke in her like a mirror reflecting a thrown rock (like a volcano under the sea).

She screamed. And the mountain buckled.

The experience left her unconscious, but, as Bishop told her, she sent a storm out to meet Magneto's followers. He was able to protect them from the metal shards that were like bullets, but it did give them the cover they needed to get away. From then on she realised where she'd been going wrong: she'd assumed that she was pulling their energy directly from them when they released it (a fair supposition given the results of their experimenting).

But no.

What she'd been doing was pulling their _Will _into her own mind – their innate knowledge of how to use their powers. And then, without realising it, she'd been picking up on the powers they were using and very slowly converting the effects back into energy (which her body didn't know what to do with because, despite everything, it wasn't _her _energy and didn't belong).

They went back to the drawing board, then, and came up with the answer.

If she stayed in physical contact with a mutant's Will (often only possible by touching them) she could mirror it – get an imprint – and use their abilities. Even though she only needed an copy of their Will, the power they expended personally was necessary to maintain the connection. Still, it was very possible to use her own life force to augment what she was doing.

The more complex the process, the more of the original energy was needed to make it effective.

And there were some things that were impossible because she had the wrong body (Colossus' mutation springs to mind) or because they were so abstract or so personal that she didn't have the necessary experience to use them properly (Shadowcat's). Still, she could go toe-to-toe with Magneto if he ever showed his face again (which, of course, he inevitably did) and, eventually, she learnt to resist the shock to her system of having such alien strain put on her then abruptly removed.

Whatever she did, though – however well she mimicked the process, resisted the energy build-up; trained her muscles and her mind – it always hurt.

Somehow, though, it was never quite as bad as thinking about what came next.

The first men she killed were, in fact, the unfortunate crew of a plane on recon for the entire incident, half a mile away. They weren't the last.

In the end, she chose Mirrorshard.

They were the hunted, of course. Forced into ever shrinking and far-between patches of ground beneath the dark sky. Somehow she managed to grip onto the difference between justice and truth; between love and hate. But that only meant that she got sleep at night, not that people didn't die.

Because they did. Every day.

They were being exterminated _every day_ and she sometimes wondered if she qualified as a masochist for going on.

In the end, she reasoned that to keep fighting was the right thing to do because as long as she _lived_ – as long as all of them remembered who and what they were – they could never be truly defeated. A hollow victory, to be sure, but it wasn't as if it was a _future_ any of them were fighting for. Just to live.

She said that to Charles one day and that it was enough.

* * *

"_You say that with such conviction."_

"_I do, you know."_

"_Ah, you must forgive an old man. To be young and to live seems as distant as the world I once knew." He looked at her and she had the curious feeling that he still didn't know what to make of her, even after ten years._

"_I wish I knew if you truly believed that."_

_She sighed._

"_If it makes you feel better, it's not exactly a choice. I have to believe there is a point to living that's worth dying for. Weird as _that_ sounds." A strange chuckle escaped her. "It all we have."_

"_We have each other." Charles pointed out, a smile and quiet passion underpinning his words._

* * *

She'd frowned as she thought about that. Not because it was untrue, but because for him it really _was_ all he had.

For her, as long as she remembered why she loved people in the first place, and fought for them, both alive and not, she could remember who she was. It was hard sometimes, but she lived in the knowledge that, like Logan, nothing (or very little, anyway) could really break her.

Well…

Not quite in the same way, it's true, but _they_ would always come away from the nuclear fire.

Looking at Charles inexorably drew the conclusion that he'd die with everyone else – was dying, in fact. As fast as their world. He had hope (_oh bugger him and his bloody Hope_) but, really, that was because he'd rather look to hope than to their bleak, ever accelerating doom.

They were getting better, now. The Sentinels. They were always adapting. There was no way to hide; no means to run forever.

Between her and Shadowcat, they discovered Kitty's untapped ability to uncouple consciousness from physical bodies (just as she uncoupled herself and whatever she touched from the physical world) and project it back through time as well as space. This allowed them to make minor alterations to their present and stay ahead of the tide. But each could feel the countdown.

Bishop and her (and whoever else was strong enough) watched the ones they loved die over and over again. Kitty bowed under the constant exhaustion of maintaining the process' stability. The others spoke of the next month. And then the next week. And then nothing. Day after passing day.

In the true timeline, she died three weeks before Charles came to Kitty with his proposal.

In the timeline afterwards, she died two days before Logan was sent back.

The third time, she died by Storm's side as they defended the monastery.

Not that she knew it.

But Logan kept looking at her oddly towards the end of that third run; as if he saw something that surprised him or that wasn't quite right in his mind.

The thing was, they knew by now – they all did – that repeatedly reaffirming the connection, whether intentionally or because of a time-loop, meant that the consciousness anchored more effectively _at the other end_. It happened to Bishop. Instead of history changing around him, his mind established itself in his past body permanently. From his point of view, it stranded him there.

The fourth time through was when it went wrong. Logan's mind was replaced with that of a future version that remembered events which weren't necessarily ever going to happen – something he realised only after he was fished up out of the river in 1973.

And so time changed again.

* * *

_**A.N: so the prologue to another story. My brain is a maniac sometimes, but, to be fair, subconscious escapism during exams isn't exactly unheard of. Anyway, just watched X-men: Days of the Future Past and this sprang into my head two days later (fully formed as usual :P ). Anyway, since this is a relatively self-contained prologue, I don't feel any guilt putting it up and leaving it for a bit.**_

_**A ever, I love to hear from anyone who's liked it at all since it makes me feel less of a loon for writing it in the first place :D**_


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